If you didn’t make it to every session you wanted to at the Professional Convention Management Association annual meeting in January—or you didn’t make it to the meeting at all—the education now has a home online. PCMA has a new Web portal called the “Live Learning Center,” where members can listen to recorded sessions of live meetings and get access to slide presentations, handouts, and other educational materials.
This content repository now includes recorded sessions from PCMA’s 2007 annual meeting in Toronto as well as the PCMA 2007 Leadership Conference, held in April at Walt Disney World in Orlando. The site includes video and audio recordings of the sessions, synchronized with slide presentations, handouts, speaker bios, and other relevant information. The online portal was developed for PCMA through a partnership with Content Management Corp., a publisher of event-based content located in Richmond Hill, Ontario.
Users can search learning opportunities by meeting, track, speaker, or simply a keyword. Sessions are available at no cost to attendees, while others can access the content for varying fees. PCMA is also working on a system for awarding continuing education credits to those who complete sessions online. As time goes on, the portal will be enhanced with sessions from future learning events. PCMA staff is also in the process of reviewing 2006 annual meeting sessions for appropriate additions to the site.
Visitors will also be able to access stand-alone distance learning programs at the site. PCMA’s Certified Association Sales Executive (CASE) program will be available in July and its CMP Online Prep course will be available in the fall. New webconferencing opportunities are likely in the future.
Go to www.pcma.org to access the Live Learning Center.